Just finished three solo games of Viticulture Essential Edition versus the automata deck. I lost the first game horribly, scoring only 12 points as my engine never got going and I couldn’t get many order cards I could fill, but won the second and third games scoring 21 points and 23 points respectively. The final game was particularly pleasing, ending with two well balanced fields, regular harvesting and wine production and finishing with value 9 red, blush and sparkling wines in the cellar, plus value 8 white grapes in the crush pad.
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A thoroughly unsuccessful but enjoyable weekend of games. Introduced a couple of friends to Azul. Despite being them being new to the game and me having played it a fair bit, I came in a distant third.
Next up was Mysterium, which I had recently received as a birthday present. I was the ghost, and all was going fine. I was particularly pleased with the scarecrow/crucifix clue I gave to guide one player towards the nun. We reach the end, and I’m trying to guide them towards the scenario where the murder took place in the bedroom, and as luck would have it I had a card with pillows on. Easy! Surely this can’t go wrong… Unless two players focus in on the arrows in the pillows and think this means the syringe weapon. Madness.
I then lost a game of cockroach poker before finishing a close second in 7 Wonders.
To make up for it, my girlfriend charitably lost (or so she claims) a game of Carcassonne and Quadropolis this morning. I’m not above pity wins, so I’ll take them.
Should also add, we managed a few 3 player and 4 player rounds of the Crew. First time playing it, but I get the hype. Lovely game.
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We finished up a two part session of a Path of the Serpent scenario in Mansions of Madness. We lost, horribly. The basic idea was that an expedition had raided a temple to Yig in South America somewhere and when they brought the artifacts back to this guy’s mansion they triggered an invasion of jungle, replacing huge chunks of the place with ruins and undergrowth and scattering rubble everywhere. It seemed like we needed to recover some magical figurines and replace them in the proper order but we had some terrible rolls and were plagued by Feathered Serpents, a Hunting Horror, and eventually some NPCs becoming Serpent People leading to my girlfriend Maddy’s fictional demise on a rope bridge over a chasm. Which, of course, gives everyone else one turn to win. And as we were all insane and at least two turns from accomplishing anything (not to mention, being attacked by Serpent People)…nope! I still really like the game, despite how hard it is to win. It feels very thematic most of the time and you never quite know what’s coming, which is a plus in a horror game.
Just now I introduced Maddy to the Arkham Horror LCG using the fabulous Super Complete TTS mod (pulled from the workshop in the purge back in April, but those who still had it like me can play it and it’s still being worked on elsewhere). We tackled the introductory Night of the Zealots scenario, but with newer investigators and decks (Mandy Thompson for me, Rita Young for her). The early game was a bit slow since we had no monsters coming out and Rita’s deck was built around evasion and killing monsters, and I didn’t manage to find any of my extra-clue cards until we’d finished investigating. But we managed to take out the Ghoul Priest when it spawned between my Blood Rites and a supercharged Meat Cleaver blow at the end, and escaped with only minor trauma. Looking forward to finishing out the campaign and maybe getting to try, well…any campaign that wasn’t in the core box really - that’s all I’ve ever done. 
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In the last few weeks I’ve managed to squeeze a couple of things in here and there. Played a bit of Akrotiri, which I got in a trade, and I love it. Simple rule set that creates a lot of great choices. I like the spatial aspect of trying to position your temples. The opacity of the scoring lets you feel like you are doing great while also being terribly worried about your opponent maybe doing better than you each time they place a temple. I also appreciate that you can completely wreck yourself by placing all of your temples too early. All around, I think this is a lovely little 2-player that will get just as much love as Targi.
Air, Land, & Sea - I just grok this game very well. I’ve lost once out of maybe 10-12 plays. So, I love it. Tight, tense, tactical. I think this is probably the best 2-player filler game I have, and I’ll play it at the drop of a hat. I just wish the theme were different.
Lastly, I got 2 solo games of Everdell: Spirecrest in over the weekend and beat year 2 Rugwort handsomely both times. I haven’t tried it on year 3 yet. I absolutely love this expansion. The weather cards caused me to consider cards and plays I normally wouldn’t, and that actually ended up opening me to new strategies I wouldn’t typically go for. So, at one point I have 10 berries, 12 wood, 5 stone, and 4 amber. I would have previously believed this impossible, but I just haven’t been comboing my resources as well as I could have been or cycling cards as well. This expansion fits so well into the game without making it too complex or drastically altering everything. Plus, your foxes can ride a bear. Right? Very eager to get this to the table as more than just solo.
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Yeah. I don’t mind the theme in general but, like D-Day Dice, it’s a very light game to carry it.
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Something about the theme makes me laugh whenever you reveal a sneaky max power boat card in land. I know what it’s going for but I can’t help but imagine I giant boat stuck in a trench.
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I’ve never played D-Day Dice, but it looks interesting. Worth checking out?
I don’t so much mind the theme as it keeps others from giving it a chance. My partner for example. She has no interest in games with military theme, though she has a whole lot of interest in take-that, and will play ruthlessly every chance she gets. If there were a different theme, I think she would love the mechanisms involved.
Well, from a tactical standpoint, I don’t think anyone would expect an aircraft carrier deployed on land, so… element of surprise?
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[embarrassed look]
I have all of the 2nd edition, which I bought largely on the basis of the SU&SD review of the 1st. Sitting in a pile from the kickstarter waiting for me to unwrap and play it.
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I felt the same about Blitzkrieg. It feels trivial to give a light abstract game such a heavy theme. It’s unnecessary and acts as a downer for what is otherwise a fun game.
…and then to make a Nippon expansion, which includes Godzilla!!! What were they thinking? It’s so many different antithetical tones mixed together, I don’t even know how to approach it.
I would’ve loved it to keep the Dogs of War theming, but there’s publisher’s IP rights that probably got in the way of that.
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Yeh, the theme killed my interest in Blitzkrieg. Otherwise “Dogs of War but lighter and quicker” would have been an instant buy.
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I’m going to stretch the definition of “played” again, but I’m taking what I can get. Alone is set up and ready for a teach. If the stars align and the baby behaves, I figure we can get this one done by Halloween. 
Alone sat on my shelf untouched and mostly unobserved for months, which is a rarity for me, but it’s October, so I figured it was time to break it out. I tend to avoid introducing highly asymmetric games to my partner since she’s already my (usually) willing test subject for runthroughs/teaching practice. Basically, I’m careful not to overwhelm her with new stuff or to burden her with overhead. In this case though, the game was purchased with her in mind, so wish me some luck!
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Played good old Hansa Teutonica - it’s been a while. Tried to swing early on city vps early in the game, didn’t work as I found myself running out of cubes in both of my supplies.
18Mex with Wyvern. Got rules wrong lmao. But solid 18xx title.
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Enjoyed a nice ‘Games with the Kid’ night tonight, gave him the run of the game shelves and he chose a few really light games that we hadn’t played in a long time.
Started with Impact: Battle of Elements which is essentially Strike. Bit of competitive push your luck dice chucking. My wife joined in for a game of Go Nuts for Donuts which saw him wipe the floor with both of us. And then we had a game of Cockroach Salad which we nearly had to stop before the end because he was laughing so hard I thought he was going to rupture something internally! 
Good to have a laugh, particularly as we were told the whole country (Ireland) is back to almost our highest level of lockdown again for the next 6 weeks, from midnight tomorrow. Well, hopefully we’ll get to have a few more family game nights going at least. So this thread and the ‘What are you reading’ thread should see a few more posts from me!
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Tonight’s bimonthly game night (staying virtual and likely to remain so):
Legendary Inventors - feels kind of like Augustus with the bits thrown in a blender and taken out in a different order. I put a lot of effort into getting a decent run, only to find out that I’d have had a lot more points by putting the same effort into other things; another player hoped to finish with inventor improvements, only to find that the bag randomly didn’t throw up any of the right value in the final phase. All a bit arbitrary, but light and fast-moving, and I wouldn’t mind playing it again.
Thurn und Taxis - a classic of course, but the first time I’ve played it. It has the feeling of being a game that would reward card counting, at which I’m very bad. Had fun but I don’t suppose I will play often enough to get competent, unless I play nothing else for a bit, which is unlikely.
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My wife and I played a game of Unmatched last night, her Medusa vs. my Sinbad.
I started off with a decent hand, having two of the voyage catds, but one of them was the Voyage Home card that returns all of your played voyage cards to your hand, which is something I would have wanted to draw later in the game. I kept my distance with Sinbad and tried leveraging the Porter more, though eventually one of Medusa’s harpies came in to deal some damage. I took it out and later managed to hit Medusa for a point with the Porter.
My wife uses the harpies very defensively, blocking off avenues to Medusa, but with one down that was harder so I started trying to force her into positions where I could attack, and managed to do so with Sinbad, getting a couple more damage in, but taking some hits in return. Got the health totals to something like 10 for me to 9 for her.
Then I had a perfect setup. Medusa attacked the Porter and I defended with Leap Away, which let me move either fighter up to 4 spaces, so I moved Medusa out of her harpy screen and next to Sinbad. I had 5 Voyages in my discard, and still had the Voyage Home in hand. So I played it and, of course, she Feinted. What should have been 7 damage for her to defend against became just a 2, and no cards came back to my hand. I think this cost me the game. I followed with a different attack (which I should have done in the first place to draw out any Feints) which she defended.
She hammered me from there on out, finishing me off with the Quick Glance scheme which does 2 damage. I don’t remember if I hit her for any more damage. As it was, I only had 5 cards left in my deck and she had a lot more, so fatigue would have done me in pretty soon anyway.
And she wanted me to note that she was slightly inebriated at the time. Either I suck at this game, she is incredibly good at this game, Medusa is overpowered, or some combination of all three are involved here. Inhave only won one game of this, our second one which was my King Arthur vs. her Medusa. I have lost the other 8 games we’ve played. It is still really fun though.
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On Monday played the first few days of a Too Many Bones game in physical space for the first time with my other girlfriend (a recent addition - modern life is complicated). She took Tantrum, I took Ghillie. We handled the initial battle with a near shut out. She can actually roll meaningful damage, unlike me.
It’s a bit more demanding of a game than she is apparently used to, but it went over well and it awaits our return next time she’s over.
Yesterday was online gaming. We were down my friend Liz, so we went back to our in-progress Mage Knight game. I was convinced we were doomed after both Ed and I took huge damage in early fights, but I’m now like level 6, have three tier 3 or 4 Units at my disposal, and a bunch of powerful spells and skills, so recent encounters have scathed me barely at all, and one of those spells healed half my wounds shortly before we called it quits for the evening, so I’m feeling more optimistic. Volkare’s still gonna be a hell of a challenge, though. We’re still only halfway through the rounds, so it’s not going super fast, but the pace definitely picked up notably compared to that first session. It’s really reminding me how much I love this game, slowness, fiddliness, and all.
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Solo games tonight – my first plays through of Elevenses For One and At the Gates of Loyang.
The first is a very little (just 13 cards) solitaire puzzle of trying to manipulate a randomised sequence of eleven special abilities over the course of ~14 turns such that you can extract them in numerical order. I’ve been playing The Lost Expedition in recent times, and the gameplay made me think very slightly of that (but perhaps it’s simply reminiscent of other patience games generally). The art work is lovely, and I just really enjoy having a game which is themed (however lightly) around making a posh morning tea as quickly as possible. I managed to avoid being fired in two games, and in the other two Lady Agatha was so pleased with me she gave me a half-day off!
The cards are sturdy, but don’t seem to have a very smooth surface for good shuffling, so I was happy to discover that the only pack of card sleeves I had of the size in question, although nearly-depleted, contained 14 sleeves : ) That worked a treat.
It’s a very simple game – it’s not going to rock anyone’s world – but it’s tiny and fast and quite a nice puzzle, so I’m happy I picked it up. Most likely I’ll pop the cards it into a much smaller case of some kind, and it can live in my bag.
The box also contained a solo card game about 10-pin bowling, so I guess I’ll give that a whirl sometime. (The bowling game actually took up far more room in the box, as it has a larger deck and also a printed scorepad!)
At the Gates of Loyang took me a good couple of hours for my first game, but hopefully would be more like one hour with some practice. I managed 16 on the prosperity track, which I felt was totally acceptable for my first game (the manual said 17 was good, 18 was very good, and 19 was outstanding). I had a single ‘casual customer’ the entire game, who was fated to never receive a single vegetable : ) I was able to avoid ever taking a loan (those seem really brutal), and mostly I was doing reasonably well with regular customers – until I realised most of my fields were going to dry up with a couple rounds remaining, and I wasn’t in any position to fulfil orders and plant new fields. I got lucky with a couple of market cards in the final round, and was able to trade just enough of the things I didn’t have to reach my “almost but not quite ‘good’” result : )
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The original (2-4 player) game is very adversarial, so it’s delightful to imagine you’re playing as high society ladies sabotaging each other’s tea parties by stealing biscuits and hiding crockery.
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I forget what exactly prompted it, but I started watching a Youtube playthrough of Kingdom Death: Monster a day or two back. I’ve long been curious about the game, but nowhere near curious enough to drop the kind of money they’re asking (or e.g. assemble minis). And I’ve heard really mixed opinions. Some folks love the game. Others, e.g. Paul in his SU&SD review, not so much. Personally, I was kind of expecting to lean in the “not” direction given the heavy randomness and the way you can just arbitrarily be savagely punished by the dice, plus the unnecessary T&A in the artwork and the way a couple of cards seemed to betray a juvenile sensibility (e.g. referring to a monster’s penis as a “ding-dong”) that badly clashed with the weird horror of the setting.
Then, on a whim, I gave it a go myself in a really slick, scripted Tabletop Simulator mod (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2112101994), playing solo over lunch break. I got utterly destroyed by the tutorial encounter, all four survivors mercilessly slaughtered by poor rolls on both actually managing to hurt the Lion and not instantly dying when severely injured. I was not impressed. Almost no decision-making, and almost no way to mitigate the huge amount of luck that conspired to end my run before it even properly began. Some of the atmosphere was good, though, and the AI and hit location systems are pretty cool. And gosh, that mod is slick.
Fast forward to tonight, when two of my usual gaming group is either sick or (it turned out) fell asleep shortly before we were due to start. I’m telling my friend Ed about my experience getting murdered by a weird White Lion. “Fuck it,” I say, “why don’t I load it up and show you what I’m talking about?” And I do, pointing at various bits of the game, talking about the mechanics. We end up playing, why not. This time, we survive with a mere two casualties, albeit at the cost of most of our Founder’s Stone weaponry. We get to populate the settlement, learn Language, build crafting structures, craft crude bone and hide gear, ritually eat our fallen friends. Storms roll in, because I’ve added the Gorm expansion after reading someone say they recommended using that one even to new players. We see about hunting ourselves a Gorm, why not try something a little different? This fight goes much better - sure, we still lose a survivor (fatally headbutted in the arms to his instant demise), but nobody else gets worse than heavily wounded (despite much charging and puking) and our new weapons are quite effective. We learn to make ammonia from its urine, develop new crafting structures and practices, get another whack of materials, and now we have an experienced and effective one-eyed dagger mistress to lead the hunt. We didn’t continue to our second settlement phase really (the above were pretty much all the aftermath of the Gorm showdown)…but we probably will.
The arbitrariness of the random elements (and so, so much is random) is still a big flaw for me. But I will admit, I think I like it anyway?
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